1,510 easy and fully explained recipes, with +66K photos and 78 videos

This site uses only a few technical cookies necessary for its operation. By continuing to browse, you accept their use.
To find out more...

Cream and sauces

Have you ever wondered why making beautiful tasty sauces is so easy when you use cream?

20 K 4.4/5 (20 reviews)

Keywords for this post:Sauce Recipe Taste Cream

Last modified on: October 15^th 2012

For this post: Comment Follow Send to a friend

Cream and sauces

First of all, we need to be aware that some flavours only dissolve in water, while others only dissolve in fats.

This phenomenon leads to this kind of accident: If you put a chocolate mousse uncovered in the fridge where you are also keeping fish, the chocolate, being mostly made up of cocoa butter (a fat), will absorb the fish smell. Imagine the taste…

So we have water on the one side and fats on the other. Cream seen under the microscope is made up of water with minute fat globules (which come from milk) suspended in it.

This gives us the explanation: the make up of cream allows it to absorb both types of flavours, so it can absorb virtually all flavours. This means that cream produces sauces which are always full of flavour drawn from everything around it (whatever is stuck on the bottom of the pan, the ingredients in the recipe, etc.).

Add to this that during cooking a proportion of the cream will evaporate, and this means that it will thicken and give a rich smooth texture in the mouth – perfect!

And then there's the question of all those calories, but that's quite another matter…

Lasts posts

Thinning out herbs

If you need to add a long-stemmed herb (tarragon, mint, verbena, thyme, etc.) to a recipe, you'll probably only need the leaves and not the stem, so you'll need to remove the leaves. Leaf removal means keeping only the beautiful leaves, and eliminating the ugly stems and leaves, but how do you do...
August 8^th 20257455

Add a bay leaf

Bay leaf: small in size, but big in flavor. You'll find it in hundreds of recipes, and it's often added to cooking meat, in a sauce or broth, usually accompanied by other herbs or products. It's a staple of Provençal, Mediterranean and Oriental cuisine, but not the only one. Usually, in a...
July 31^th 20251,1675

Parsley stems

Parsley, whether curly or flat, is a delicious ingredient in many recipes, where it is used both raw and cooked. When used raw, in a salad for example, where it always provides, alone or with other herbs, a remarkable freshness, only the leaves are kept. And when used cooked?
July 28^th 20251,195 13

A drizzle of olive oil

Often in a recipe, you have to "baste" vegetables, for example, before sending them to the oven. What the author means by this is that you need to put oil on top of the vegetables to cook them in the oven. Typically, we just quickly drizzle oil over the vegetables, hoping not to miss any, but...
July 13^th 20251,4235

Always secure your cutting board

When using a cutting board, it's very important that it's stable and doesn't move while you're cutting, for safety's sake. Boards have a natural tendency to slide on the work surface, but here are 2 ways to block them effectively.
July 1^st 20251,5085

See all posts Random post RSS feeds

Other pages you may also like

How to choose a centrifugal juicer

A centrifugal juicer is an appliance designed to extract juice from all kinds of fruit and vegetables. It will produce juice from tomatoes, carrots, apples, pineapple, blackcurrants, etc.
April 1^st 201142 K4.4

What can I use for blind baking a pastry case?

When it comes to home-made desserts, tarts are always popular. They can be divided into two basic types: those cooked with their filling, such as an apricot and almond cream tart, and those where the filling is added after baking the pastry case, such as a strawberry tart or chocolate tart. For...
May 2^nd 2017109 K4.5

Small, regular pieces

When we cook, bake or pastry, we often have to cut food into small pieces, often cubes, to incorporate them into a recipe or preparation. How do you get regular pieces fairly quickly?
November 28^th 20208,5844.5

Butter doesn't make you fat, unless you eat too much of it.

Whenever I'm discussing cooking and recipes, there is one idea which comes up frequently, like this: "Oh no! But that's got butter in it" (I should add, for the sake of accuracy, that this is something I hear more frequently from women, who are almost all concerned with keeping their figure). ...
March 26^th 201241 K4.5

Fruits which can ruin your jelly

There are many ways of making a fruit mousse, but one of the simplest is to prepare a fruit jelly (basically a fresh fruit coulis with gelatine) and then mix this jelly before it sets completely with whipped cream. The result is perfect for filling a charlotte, for example. But do beware;...
March 6^th 201375 K4.0